When I visited DC in June, spirits were high and the humidity wasn’t. Ms. Rhee had just negotiated with Ms. Weingarten the most aggressive performance-based pay contract in education history. Strasburg was taking the mound for the first time. And I got to sample my first Halfsmoke from Ben’s Chili Bowl at Nationals' Stadium while sitting on the first baseline as the right-handed rocket launcher mowed down the Pirates with hundred-mile-an-hour heaters I could barely tell had left his hand until I heard them thwack in the catcher's mitt behind the plate. Now Rhee is gone. Strasburg has succumbed to Tommy John. And all I’ve got is a freezer full of Halfsmokes.

I may not have always agreed with Ms. Rhee’s methods or her madness, but I desperately wanted her to be successful. I wanted the schools in our nation’s capitol to be the best schools in our nation. And I thought Ms. Rhee could pull it off. I wasn’t necessarily a big fan of the way she was pulling it off, but I was willing to suspend judgment until all the votes were counted.

Then the votes were counted and Rhee left town faster than a note of Strasburg’s chin music. The Halfsmokes are good. And dining on them every Sunday certainly improves my experience of most Redskins games. But a few dozen sausages hasn’t made me feel better about what has happened in DC’s schools.

Ms. Rhee’s legacy will live on in the District. So it may be many years before the real lessons of her tenure come to light. The simplest truth at this moment is that her work is incomplete. Whatever lessons we take away, then, will likely be incomplete as well. That said, I have a few incomplete insights of my own to offer.

LESSON #1: Waiting for Superman is not a viable strategy.

We love heroes. We love the idea that some one person, or lonely band of rag tag revolutionaries, will swoop in and save us. This is not just what makes our country great, but what actually made our county—or so we have mythologized it in our collecitve conscience. We see the impact of heroic action in sports. We think we see it in the private sector (though I suspect there are always other forces at work). And we’d like to see it in politics (although so far the best we’ve been able to do is come up is the iconic "Hope" poster.). In education, our belief in Superman remains unchallenged, and it really should be, because it sets us back again and again.

When I lived in Seattle, we got very excited in the mid-1990s when General John Stanford was hired to run our schools. He was a great man and he appeared to be making great progress until he was taken by cancer. His successor was an intelligent, able, and affable man, but he wasn’t Superman. And now, 15 years later, Seattle is still waiting.

After a three-year stint with its own Superman, DC is now waiting once again, too. What will presumptive Mayor Gray do? Whom will he select? Superman’s #2 holds the interim reins. But Superman is gone, presumably off to fight another battle somewhere else against the forces of evil (aka teachers’ unions).

Playing #2 to Superman must be like playing Truman to FDR. But then, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry” defeated Dewey and sent the pundits scrambling. History now paints him quite a flattering portrait, so I suppose anything is possible.

If you’ve followed education reform for any length of time, you’ve probably gotten used to the “hurry up and wait” feeling of it all. We wait for Superman and then we hurry to implement superhero reforms. Shortly thereafter, for whatever reason, Superman leaves, and we’re left waiting once again, as Superman always seems to skip town or be run out on the rails before his or her work has been completed.

With each Supermanic-depressive cycle the clock resets itself and we’re forced to begin again at time zero. The problem isn’t that Seattle’s successor to John Stanford didn’t continue with his reforms, or that Ms. Rhee’s successor won’t continue with hers, the problem is that we keep waiting for Superman instead of working to improve our school, calmly, creatively, courageously, and continually.

We keep waiting for that one special person, that savior to save us. Without that person, we feel little can be accomplished. With that person we’re always surprised by his or her mere mortality. And when that person leaves, the Superness leaves, and we’re left waiting Superman yet again.

We need to stop waiting for Superman. We need to stop waiting. Period. The idea that sustainable systemic change in education must be tied to a single person—or even the entire Education Justice League—is illogical, historically inaccurate, and counterproductive. No player is greater than game. Every sports fan knows this. Every schools fan should know it, too.

LESSON #2: “Mayor Control” is an oxymoron.

While I’m not a fan of traditional school board governance, I don’t see that mayoral control is quite the panacea many of us had hoped for.

First of all, did Mayor Fenty exert much control over the DC schools? He certainly didn’t control his Chancellor. At the very least, I think a deft and, at one time, popular politician would have had his young eduprotégée in for a classic “Come to Jesus meetin’” about her way of building support for her work around the District.

Granted, Rhee insists on being taken on her own terms, but terms can always be negotiated. I can understand a mayor having confidence in his Chancellor. I can see a mayor giving his Chancellor autonomy. But I can’t see a mayor with true “mayoral control” of schools letting his school leader get so needlessly out of control as Ms. Rhee did on several occasions.

Mr. Hess is correct when he asserts that things were unlikely to have turned out differently had Ms. Rhee simply been nice to people. But what if she’d been charming? Hilary Clinton won over the Senate even after that disastrous debacle over healthcare. Certainly someone of Ms. Rhee’s talent, and the better parts of her nature, could have won over a city?

There are many themes a leader can use to advance an agenda. That Rhee organized her work around the theme of Good vs. Evil was unfortunate, unwise, and unnecessary. She was hand-picked by a mayor who had won every ward in the city. She had the full imprimatur of a fully supported elected leader. Why not choose to set the stage a little differently? Why choose to incite when merely being insightful probably could have gotten the ball rolling? Nobody thought DC’s schools were working. Why not build a campaign on the idea that they could be made better through thoughtful change and reasonable reorganization? Did the Chancellor feel so embattled from Day One that waging a war seemed to her the only option?

Second, it takes much longer than three years and change to change a school district, and when Chancellors quit even before their mayors leave office, they have even less time than that. To the extent that mayors are tied to the school leaders they choose, electoral forces shape the local landscape in dramatic ways. City Hall can handle the upheaval, schools may not be so hearty.

What part of the election was about Gray versus Fenty? What part was about anyone else versus Rhee? We’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter; city schools go through a period of destabilization regardless in the mayoral control model. We’re used to this in politics, the perpetual campaign is just the way it is. But we’re not used to this in schools. Shuffling new school leaders every three or four years probably isn’t the most promising approach for sustaining positive change.

“Mayor control” of schools may turn out to be very fragile. Mayors may not have much control over their chosen school leaders. And school leaders may not have much control over the fate of their mayors. Worse yet, pairing the two may simply give the opposition a bigger target to shoot at.

Traditional board governance is clumsy, inefficient, and fraught with a million indecisions made by unpaid, non-experts who often represent a constituency as narrow and fragmented as the children in their own family. Mayoral control solves part of this problem but it’s probably too fragile to support the lengthy nature of district-wide change. A third governance structure, one modeled on more enduring and effective organizations within our society, must be created.

LESSON #3: Quitters never win.

Ms. Rhee got many things done in just three years. So why not stick around for a fourth? That’s 33% more Rhee, and 33% more Rhee is a lot of change. It doesn’t appear that she was forced to resign, and Mr. Gray has said publicly that her reforms would continue. For her part, Ms. Rhee insisted she would continue to work for the education of our nation’s children. So why not continue to work for them in our nation’s capitol?

Rewind a few weeks to just before the primary. Why was Ms. Rhee out stumping for Fenty, threatening to leave if her boss wasn’t asked back? Why not say, with a little more class and a lot more courage, that she was committed to working for the education of her district’s children, and that she would continue to do so no matter who was running the city? Wouldn’t that have been the savvy move—and the signature move of a committed, brass-knuckled, “I don’t play politics!” reformer? She could still have endorsed Fenty, but she could have reminded the electorate that her true loyalty was to the city and its kids.

But perhaps her loyalties lay elsewhere.

Matthew Yglesias and others have suggested that Rhee did not keep her eyes on the prize of DC school reform, that her tenure as Chancellor was a résumé bullet point en route to bigger and better roles on the national stage. As Miss Clairol might have said, “Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” But that witchy Time magazine cover didn’t help much. And neither does her Baltimore Colts-like exit or Sarah Palinesque instantaeneous I-haven't-been-planning-this-for-three-months injection into the Internet. Apparently, resigning from a high profile job is the latest social media strategy. I wonder how this is affecting the proprietary Google PageRank algorithm?

The lesson here is the same one our coaches taught us, the same one our moms and dads taught us, the same tired but true, and oh-so-unglamorous cliché that just about anyone who ever cared about us spouted off every time we pouted off saying we’d never come back again: Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Had she served out even one more lame duck year, Ms. Rhee could have picked up big wins. And who knows? With a four-year record and a few more victories behind her, especially victories related to the new performance-based pay contract, maybe even Mr. Gray could have found a way to stick with her.

LESSON #4: The egos of adults are more important than the interests of children.

Now I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but from 250 miles to the south, it seems to me that Ms. Rhee was guilty of having offended people, and that those who took offense brought their umbrage with them to the ballot box. It’s hard for me to see how DC schools were worse off after three years of Ms. Rhee’s work, and easy in many ways to see how they were better. But umbrage clearly carried election day.

Did Ms. Rhee make mistakes? Yes. And most of them were, sadly, unnecessary. But what about results? I know DC had a slight test score drop this year, but Rhee seemed right on it, accountable, and ready to spring into action. Operationally, the district has improved dramatically. People I know who have lived in DC for years seemed genuinely excited about their schools for the first time that I can remember.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Rhee pissed people off by doing a bunch of things she didn’t need to do (and a bunch that she did need to do). Pissed off people felt that being pissed off was an important electoral issue. Neither side seems to have considered the kids during what can only be crassly classified as a big time pissing contest.

LESSON #5: TFA’s reach still exceeds America’s grasp.

For years we’ve been talking about Teach for America. But we’ve never understood our own discussion. We keep talking about whether TFA puts good teachers into classrooms, or whether TFA is fair to non-TFA teachers, or whether this kind “Peace Corps” approach is really worth much at all. Each of these arguments misses the point of TFA entirely. TFA is no longer a program, or even a conventional non-profit organization; it’s a force for highly targeted forms of change at all levels of the system.

Few have worked that system more successfully than Ms. Rhee. It’s hard to separate TFA and Michele Rhee. She is perhaps TFA’s brightest star. She is also a symbol of what TFA really does—launch and support the careers of people like Ms. Rhee.

TFA doesn’t put thousands of kids into under-served schools for two-year stints. TFA puts tens of thousands of people into the world with education on their minds for life and a deeply inculcated mindset about what’s wrong with American education (traditional teachers, traditional leaders, and traditional schools) and what’s right (alternative track talent, new-style heroic leaders, and charter schools). I’m not saying I agree with their analysis, only that their analysis is what it is and that it resonates very deeply with many people.

To keep TFA going strong, all its supporters have to do is fan the flywheel of its expanding celebrity. To those who might be uncomfortable with TFA’s growing popularity and influence, they will have to do more than cite unfavorable studies, raise ethical issues, or throw rotten vegetables; they will have to do what TFA has done and create a counter-balancing organization with the same unrelenting focus and dynamism. So who’s up for being Wendy Kopp’s education alter ego? Anybody? I thought not. It’s easier to complain than to create, isn’t it?

TFA is powerful stuff, folks, and it’s going right into the water supply. Who would be surprised if, 20 years from now, there were 20 Michele Rhees running 20 of our biggest urban school districts? What if there were five more KIPPs? Ten more TNTPs? Twenty more Education Pioneers? What if TFA was putting more new teachers into the system than the states of California, Texas, New York, and Florida combined?

TFA is the single most influential educational organization in the United States. It may have more real impact on reform than the federal government itself. How many of us could have predicted that within 20 years one of its corps members would be running one of our nation’s toughest school districts, and doing a pretty good job of it, too?

TFA is not without it’s detractors, of course. But the anti-TFA crowd is focused on the two years corps members spend in classrooms. TFA, by contrast, is focused on the 72 years those same people spend in society contributing directly to education like Ms. Rhee or indirectly as private citizens. You do the math.

As I see it, there are only two things that could make TFA more effective: (1) T-30-FA, a TFA program for corps members who want to become career classroom teachers; and (2) IWRBTFA or “I Was Rejected By TFA”, a program that takes the thousands of kids who don’t make the cut, but who are probably pretty darned good folks anyway, and helps them plot a path into the education system perhaps through residency programs and other new teacher preparation models.

TFA has come as close as any organization at orchestrating a paradigm shift in a sector that has operated out of a single personnel paradigm for its entire existence. TFA has solved the “Who” problem in education. That is, they have established a new paradigm of who goes into education. Like Finland, our current international educrush, TFA has made working in education prestigious. As a result, people who are attracted by prestige like Ms. Rhee (and thousands of others) are now part of our education system.

LESSON #6: Results are not the measure of reform.

If you’re old enough, or if you went to Catholic school, you probably remember an area of your report card called “comportment” or “deportment” (or both!). These things may be off the report card for kids today but they’re apparently still important metrics for school leaders—and for leaders like Ms. Rhee especially.

Ms. Rhee is unapologetic about her behavior as Chancellor. And were she a man, and a Fortune 500 CEO, no one would be asking for any apologies or making any comments about how she goes about her business. But the voters of DC were. Results, in this case at least, were not the measure of reform. And that’s significant, I think, for a national approach to educational change that is allegedly based on hard data

Reforming schools on hard data means making hard choices. But we don’t like to make hard choices and we like the people who make them even less. This bodes ill for systemic reform but might suggest a path for what we might call a-systemic reform—reform based on doing an end run around the system, using technology and other tools to create viral models of change from the classroom out rather than from the state house down.

For me at least, there’s an unsatisfying “tree falls in the woods” quality to Ms. Rhee’s tenure. If a talented school leader doesn’t serve out her full term does she still make a change? Philosophers can debate this one forever, and they probably will because it’s like to happen again and again as change-oriented educators find themselves cut down in the prime of their progress.

What we do know for sure is that results alone are not enough. Even if Rhee’s results were better, even if they were significantly better, it’s unlikely she would have found DC hospitable to her continued leadership—though I still think she should have served until she was asked to leave.

LESSON #7: The standard toolkit of reform is looking a little light.

I like to think that Rhee’s results were good. But there are many smart people who say they weren’t, that she piggybacked on the work of her predecessor, and that this past year’s test score slide showed that her witches’ brew had lost its dark magic. Either way, I think we have to acknowledge that Rhee tried most of the things we know how to try, and that we’re still not completely certain if anything really worked.

For me, this means that the standard ed reform toolkit is looking a little light. Who’s gonna push for more change in less time than Rhee? Who’s gonna draw from the TFA talent pipeline like Rhee? Who’s gonna negotiate performance-based pay programs like Rhee? Who’s goona push charters, testing, standards, teacher evaluation, etc.? Who’s gonna take the risks? Klein? Grier? Ackerman? Don’t bet on it.

We have many talented and hard-working people running our big city schools these days, but will any of them push for change the way Rhee pushed in DC? Like her or hate her, you can’t say she didn’t pull out all the stops. Perhaps this was the very thing that stopped her. But if that’s true, reform, in its current form, seems far too easy to stop. Like the tepid manifesto Rhee recently signed, perhaps the real problem here is that all the bluster in the world can’t make up for an ineffective set of lukewarm strategies for improving our schools.

If the standard tools of reform, plus force of personality, can’t get the job done, what can? Rhee’s example shows us both what is possible and what is not. With the current repertoire of standards, testing, charters, and performance-based pay, even one of the most ambitious reformers in the country can’t get as much reform as we would hope. What, then, will people of lesser talent and tenacity be able to achieve unless we develop new tools? And what new tools can we give them that will offer better leverage on the problem? We may have much farther to go than we think when it comes to fixing education in America. In fact, we may have to start all over again with different assumptions, different models, and different rules of engagement.

LESSON #8: Change takes more time than any one person seems to get.

Big districts don’t change in small chunks of time. Yet most big city school leaders have short shelf-lives. Either nothing happens and they’re tossed out for lack of results. Or too much happens—as may have happened in DC—and they’re run out on the rails for a variety of reasons that always seem to add up merely to “We just don’t like you.” or “We’re afraid.” or “Our problems have been so long a part of us that we have defined ourselves by them; if you fix them we will lose our identity.” Perhaps there’s a hyper-Goldilocks phenomenon at work here that makes it practically impossible for a single person to do just enough to be liked yet not enough to be hated.

How much change can a big city school district tolerate? Not much at all, or so it seems. For all the carping we do in our country about the intolerable status quo of our schools, we all fight pretty hard to preserve it when what we’re preserving is our own back yard. A little NIMBYism is natural, I suppose, in all matters civic. But even in places where everyone agrees schools are broken in some serious and easily identifiable way, few people seem able to tolerate the time it takes to fix things.

In my experience, it takes at least five years to see any real change in a big district; probably more like eight to ten to know if the change we see at five has stuck. Who can last that long without offending a few thousand voters? Or, to put it another way, have adults so deeply politicized the running of large school districts that they won’t allow a single person to shape their children’s lives? When you pay taxes to support a failing system, how much change is too much? Apparently almost any change at all.

There is perhaps nothing more quintessentially American than exercising one’s right to free speech in criticizing the deplorable state of one thing or another, and then exercising one’s right to vote to dismantle the very programs, policies, and people who might fix it. The closer education is allied with politics and big government, the more slowly it will change. In fact, the more federalized education becomes, the less likely education may be to ever change at all.

Knowing that few big city leaders will be around long enough to enjoy a bountiful harvest from the soil they are preparing, I’m reminded of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras discovered in “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”, certainly two of the best business books of recent times.

Great companies that stand the test of time specialize in succession planning. They promote from within and groom successors at every level. For some reason, even though our biggest school districts are easily the size of our biggest companies, we take an “out with the old, in with the new” approach almost every time. This makes succession uncertain and transitions rocky. By naming Ms. Rhee’s #2 to replace her in the interim, perhaps Mr. Gray will break with tradition. Of course, that would cause us all to wonder why Ms. Rhee’s second is more satisfactory than Ms. Rhee herself.

If we know in advance that big city school leaders rarely see their plans come to fruition, succession planning should be a key component of every district’s long term plan. Of course, that assumes districts engage in long-term planning. Of the 200 or so districts with whom I have worked, I have yet to see anything resembling a long term plan.

Here at home in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, we have a so-called “Five Year Strategic Plan” but it’s a mess of unrelated metrics, most of which are ill-defined, and a linearized progression of growth that makes it mathematically impossible to achieve success as we head into years four and five. No one ever intended this plan to be meaningful, useful, or successful. It was made merely to mollify a public impatient with 20 years of studied inaction. This is about as good as it gets in my experience. And basically, this kind of planning is good for nothing because no one, not even the people who approve the plan, know that it will have any effect whatsoever on what happens.

So perhaps it is merely a consummate lack of long term planning—and nothing at all like a Chancellor’s personality or policies—that renders reforms impotent by cutting of their life support after two and three year stints, periods of time far too tiny to tackle the large problems our largest district’s face. Regardless, it’s time we faced up to the time horizon of change in our schools and created policies, programs, and governance structures that support this.

Class Dismissed?

The first time I woke up feeling groggy on a day when I had kids to teach, I called my mom, a 30-year classroom veteran, and asked for the unofficial rules of calling in sick when you’re working in a school. “Unless you’re bleeding or your contagious, you show up!” she said. “Take a bottle of aspirin and a good attitude. You’ll need ‘em both.”

Working in schools is hard. It’s even harder with a pounding headache, an aching back, or half a hangover. But if we’re doing our job, we go in anyway. If we take Michele Rhee at her word, she’ll be going in somewhere some time soon, too. At least I certainly hope she will. As a former software entrepreneur, I eagerly await the release of Rhee 2.0.

But as some here have pointed out, she is not the story, just a part of it. Does getting big city school leaders to sign a manifesto make a difference? Probably not. Does working harder at what hasn’t been working make much sense? Probably not. Does having more Michele Rhees make a difference? Well, maybe a lot more. Like a thousand more.

So what does?

For all the lessons we may have learned, we still haven’t learned how to fix the most serious problems in our most needy urban schools. Class remains in session. We’re all taking notes. And I do believe we are learning. But we are not learning the answers to the questions that keep showing up on the test.

If we had to grade ourselves on education reform, what grade would we give? “Incomplete” would probably be the kindest evaluation of all. And so it stands for Ms. Rhee as well.

I'm not in DC, and I feel as though my knowledge of Michelle Rhee is much less than is that of many of this site’s experts. From out here in Colorado what I do know is that she became highly symbolic of a particular type of school reform. What Joe Clark and his baseball bat represented to terms of a get-tough attitude toward inner-city youth in the 1980s, Ms. Rhee and her broom have now become in terms of a get-tough attitude toward those youth’s teachers. And just as Mr. Clark became a favorite of Hollywood (remember “Lean on Me”?), it’s now Ms. Rhee’s star turn. Maybe this time around the get-tough approach will pay some dividends, but how can we not be troubled by the message?

I can appreciate Michelle Rhee's desire to make waves in the teaching arena. Good teachers deserve better than we give them and the bad ones... off with their heads? Really? The tactics, the cult of personality, and the metaphorical loaded assault rifle got in the way of sustained teacher reform in D.C.

Michelle's positions are not the problem (well, some of them are--like when she sold out to standardized test scores). Unfortunately, Michelle got it wrong even when she had it right. Rhee's problem was that her decisions and actions were not seen as collaborative efforts between like-minded reformers. Instead, it appeared as though she acted alone and moved too quickly. This caused her to appear to be a target rather than a leader. Additionally, with so much attention drawn to her personality (attention she welcomed), her efforts at change became muddled and left America second guessing her actions. We knew Michelle's age, face and educational background before we knew or understood her overall strategy. It was the combination of national attention and the speed with which she responded to poor teachers that make her better suited for the media than for true educational reform.

Lasting change takes buy-in and buy-in happens when people feel part of something important. Ms Rhee would have done well to share the spotlight, highlight the teachers who were excellent prior to her arrival and build a strong base of proponents so when poor teachers were exposed and fired it wouldn't be all about Rhee, but instead about a system that needed housecleaning.

Instead of provoking a positive re-thinking what we expect from all teachers, highlighted by examples of excellence, Michelle's cult of personality appeared as a dictatorial head hunting spree. When everyone is made to fear because leaders act too swiftly, without building support and sharing voice with others, then bad teachers get to hide the shadows of the destructive personality. In the long run, the fear left in Michelle's wake does not help students.

For the large majority of school districts and school children in America, this coversation is irrelevant. Who cares where Michelle Rhee goes? I would bet a foundation or private sector job. And she was gone no matter who won. Her financee is Mayor of Sacremento for goodness sake.

She built upon what Cliff Janey had started in much more difficult circumstances, had a great publicist ( except for the broom excess) and was cheered on by a lot of people who haven't spent 15 minutes in a classroom since they finished high school.

But what she did is irrelevant for 12000 or more of America's 14000+ school districts. It's not about mayoral control or charter schools or new teacher contracts. It's about sufficient financial resources to provide support for teachers and sufficient salary not to have them recruited away after 3 or 4 years--about the time for them to figure out how to teach well. And it's about respect for parents and teachers and lots of others.

And, you know, some one should mention that Randy Weingarten made Rhee look a lot better by working out a contract that everyone could live with. I know she's the Joker or some one that Superman much abolish. I probably have Batman and Superman confused. Down here in rural America where I live the general reaction is Michelle who?

The nation owes the African American voters of Washington, DC, a debt of gratitude for rejecting the education deform policies promoted by Rhee and Fenty. I concur with Fred Hess that ‘making nice’ is not the real issue. The real issue is, When will the U.S. population have sufficiently rejected the destructive policies Rhee promoted to persuade the wealthy promoters of privatization and testing to change their ways?

The assumption has been that because test scores went up two years out of three, there are many more charters, and she continuously attacked teachers while demonizing their union, that Rhee improved DC schools. The teachers and it appears the communities and the parents, particularly those whose children do attend DC schools, did not agree. Or if they thought there were some improvements, they were not worth the damaging price being paid.

There is no doubt that major changes are needed (still) in DC – but not the changes Rhee et al. (including some on this blog) promote. Over the past few years it has become clear that ever more intense testing fails to produce sustained gains even on independent standardized tests (e.g., NAEP), and is done at the price of turning increasing numbers of schools into test-prep programs; that charter schools on average do worse, not better, than regular public schools, despite serving fewer English language learners and students with disabilities and having the often-used advantaged of purging themselves of low-scoring students; that there is no credible evidence that paying teachers for their student test scores will improve anything; and that nations which are positively improving their schools do not use high stakes testing or privatization, and many are more unionized than is the U.S. Approaches used in those nations should be a jumping-off point for making positive changes in schools.

My read is that the DC parents and communities do want real improvement in their schools. But they aren’t buying what they are being sold. Urban and other political leaders should draw the correct lesson and promote genuine reforms, in concert with teachers and communities.

Mayoral control is a small improvement on dysfunctional urban school governance. It’s great when, like in Boston, New York or Chicago you get a decade long dynamic duo, but we just saw the downside.

Major studies by Paul Hill and Marc Tucker and a report on Governing America’s Schools from ECS all concluded that we have a flawed governance structure and should move to a system where:

·schools operate on a performance contract

·schools make decisions about personnel and budget

·money follows the student

Good work was done in DC over the last few years, but it was still an attempt to build ‘the one best system.’ The superman approach doesn’t work, but a thoughtful authorizing strategy connected to a community council may provide a pathway to sustainable quality.

Rather than operating schools, the council would ask, “What kind of schools would leverage our community resources and meet our children’s needs?” With this sort guidance an authorizer could build a portfolio of schools and networks that meet community needs.

We know how to authorizer good schools. We know how to develop good schools. Skip the revolving door, stop waiting for superman, and make every school a charter.

Education reform and politics are not—cannot be—an either/or proposition. Whether K-12 educators answer to a school board or a mayor and council, American public education is governed by the democratic process, and politics is how we make public policy.

This isn’t just a quibble. The downfall of Michelle Rhee, which was, of course, the direct consequence of the defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, has everything to do with their failure to build a constituency for education reform in D.C.’s African American community— not only the community that first made Fenty a significant force in D.C. politics but, ironically, the community that stood to benefit most from the reforms Rhee instituted. Not only do black students make up 81 percent of the population of DC public schools, but they are far less able than white families to afford to leave DCPS for one of the city’s many private schools. Yet 62 percent of DC’s African Americans voted for Fenty’s opponent, City Council Chair Vincent Gray in last month’s Democratic primary.

So what happened?

To start with, Michelle Rhee, in three years as a Teach for America classroom teacher and ten years as head of the non-profit she founded, had never been accountable to someone else. And having never before held public office, she had never reported to elected officials. From the day that her surprise appointment was announced to the City Council (after Fenty had promised to vet his choice with them before announcing it), both Fenty and Rhee treated elected officials and their constituents not as partners in but intruders in education reform. D.C. African Americans perceived reform not as something being done with them but to them.

Fenty’s and Rhee’s disdain for seeking grass-roots support for reform was compounded by their failure to grasp the degree of disruption that is the inevitable concomitant of reform. “Most folks don't welcome disruption in their lives,” as Chester Finn points out, and “aren't necessarily keen to make a change and they're even less keen to have someone force a change upon them.” Communities have grown up around neighborhood schools. Principals and teachers are respected and beloved figures in the community. Casting them as mere obstructions to her reforms was not a tactic calculated to win Rhee the community support she needed.

Fenty, who was elected by winning every voting precinct in the city, needed to take the case for reform to the neighborhood meetings with all the energy that had characterized his campaign for office. He needed to build support for reform by making the case that DCPS students in general, minority students in particular, and the DC employers who depend on DCPS graduates, were being poorly served by the school system and that reform, with all its disruption, was the road to better schools and better education. He needed to compensate for Rhee’s inexperience and modulate her natural belligerence—for example by not allowing her to appear on the cover of Time magazine clad in black and holding a broom, looking for all the world like the 21st century version of the wicked witch of the west.

Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee, in other words, needed to lock in education reform by attending to the politics of education reform.

The good news is that Washington’s presumptive next mayor, Council Chair Gray has pledged his support for education reform, and has named Kaya Henderson, a member of Rhee’s leadership team, to serve as interim chancellor. But the possibility that it might have been otherwise—that the next mayor could have been an opponent of real reform—should remind us that what one mayor gives, the next mayor can take away, and that only strong community support for good schools can ensure that reform will endure.

What’s the lesson learned from Michelle Rhee’s experience? That as long as our school systems, like other aspects of city government, are subject to the consent of the governed, attempts to institute reform without building the constituencies that reform requires place those reforms at risk.

All three lessons that he derives are on-point. Michelle will live to fight another day and the reforms she wrought in DC will not soon dissipate, at least not those pertaining to teachers. (Rumor has it that the major private funders of the new union contract have exacted that condition from Grey and Henderson--else the money goes away.) The one point to add--my colleague Mike Petrilli has been emphasizing it--is that bold education reform isn't particularly popular with the general public, particularly not when "my kid's school" or "my kid's teacher" is affected by it. Education reformers tend to suppose that there's a vast army of parents, voters and taxpayers marching behind them. Would that it were so. Most folks, though, don't welcome disruption in their lives and even if their child attends a dreadful school or has a feckless classroom instructor, they aren't necessarily keen to make a change and they're even less keen to have someone force a change upon them.

Updated at 11:34 p.m. on October 18.

If 'Michelle Rhee' was the answer, what was the question?

Presumably: How are student interests put first; as, with the removal of ineffective teachers? Tenure and other things won by the teacher unions made it hard to put students first, so tougher management came to seem essential; has almost become the definition of 'reform'.

OK. But lots of things are hard when you come at them the wrong way. What if 'strengthening management' is the wrong approach? The goal surely is: quality teachers who put students first. Might there be an easier way?

The country seems to have decided that much the unions have won is not in the student interest and not in the public interest. Their resistance on tenure, on compensation, etc. is 'a problem'.

But problems, as someone once said, do not arise by themselves. They are the product of circumstances; can be solved only by changing the circumstances that produce them. So the important question is: "What causes teachers and their unions to behave as they do?

We need to consider that their actions over the years is a predictable and understandable response to the deal we try to have with teachers. Which is, essentially: People outside tell the schools what to teach and how to teach it . . . and hold the schools and teachers accountable for success.

A president of the National School Boards Association memorably said: "We're the ones who run the schools". But will boards, superintendents and state commissioners accept accountability for learning? Not likely. They'd say: We're not the ones who teach the students.

Few reasonable people would accept accountability for what someone else controls. You probably wouldn't. Most professionals, knowledge workers, wouldn't. Teachers don't.

If it is this arrangement dividing -- authority and accountability -- that is producing the trouble in district public education then it will only intensify the conflict to bring in leadership that asserts more strongly both its authority and its demand for accountability. Which it did in the District of Columbia. The answer is, instead, to change this 'circumstance' at the heart of the system.

That is: To cut a new deal with teachers in which in return for accepting accountability for student and school success they get professional authority over what matters for student and school success. This is explained and described at http://www.educationevolving.org/teacherpartnerships/tpp_publications

There are now places where this deal is in place. It appears to work. Two teachers in such schools presented the idea in April to Secretary Arne Duncan and his top staff. It cannot be imposed, everywhere. But this model could easily be extended.

The faith in 'tougher management' will be hard to shake. But what if it truly is a dead end?

Updated at 9:08 a.m. on October 18.

Michelle Rhee, regardless of her specific impact on D.C. students, has chosen to join New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein in a national campaign for an overly simplistic and, on balance, harmful attack on incompetent teachers as the single most important problem facing public education. Although the test score gains on which Mr. Klein stakes his reputation have been exposed as seriously inflated, he and Ms. Rhee nonetheless chose the eve of her departure as the occasion for a “manifesto” of their views, published last week in the Washington Post.

The Klein-Rhee manifesto asserts that the difficulty of removing incompetent teachers “has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.”

Klein and Rhee base this assertion on a claim that, “as President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher.”

I have posted on the Economic Policy Institute website an analysis of this claim, showing that it is not an accurate reflection of the president’s view, nor is it accurate on its own terms. I won’t repeat all the details here, but invite readers who are interested to read the analysis in its entirety.

It has become conventional in educational policy discussion to assert that “research shows” that “teachers are the most important influence on student achievement.” There is, in fact, no serious research that shows any such thing. The assertion results from a careless glide from “teachers being the most important in-school influence,” to teachers being the most important influence overall. But because school effects on average levels of achievement are smaller than the effects of families and communities, even if teachers were the largest school effect, they would not be a very big portion of the overall effect. A child with an average teacher who comes from a literate, economically secure, and stable family environment will, on average, have better achievement than a child with a superior teacher but with none of these contextual advantages. Of course, some children from improverished backgrounds will outperform typical children from literate and secure backgrounds, but on average, the extent to which children come to school prepared to take advantage of what school has to offer is a more important predictor than what even the best school can do.

The overemphasis on the influence of teachers stems in part from careless interpretations of studies purporting to show that if an average low-income student had the very best teachers for several years in a row, that student’s test scores would be close to those of an average higher-income student. This interpretation, however, is not based on research regarding any actual students who had the best teachers for several years in a row. Rather, it is based on an unfounded assumption that single year gains, even under the best circumstances, can simply accumulate if multiplied for several years, without any fade-out, an assumption contradicted by other research. Further, even if it were true that improving the quality of teachers (for example, by a full standard deviation, which is what the claim usually assumes) could have this effect, it says nothing about the relative importance of teachers vs. contextual factors. To do that, you’d need to compare the effect of a one standard deviation improvement in teacher quality, holding socio-economic status constant, to the effect of a one standard deviation improvement in relative socio-economic status, holding teacher quality constant, something no researcher has attempted. Or, more simply, compare the effect of a $1,000 per pupil investment in performance pay for teachers, to the effect of a $1,000 per pupil investment in a health clinic or early childhood program. But no researcher has attempted this, either. (Note that a recent experiment, in which teachers whose students had higher test scores were given a very substantial bonus, found virtually no impact on student achievement from the performance pay.)

And there is not even serious research support for the proposition that teachers are the most important in-school influence. Existing research only compares teacher to class size or per-pupil spending effects, showing, for example, that average achievement is likely to be higher with a superior teacher in a large class than with an average teacher in a small class. But there is little or no research comparing teacher quality to a host of other school characteristics that are arguably more important than class size or per-pupil spending levels – for example, the quality of school leadership, the nature of the curriculum, or the collaborative culture of a school’s faculty.

And finally, there is not even serious research that measures the effect of teachers on the full range of achievement. What we have is only the effect of teachers on student scores on very low-quality standardized tests of basic skills in math and reading. With the stakes increasingly high on these tests, we can have less confidence that teachers who produce higher student scores are actually producing greater literacy and mathematical ability, rather than better test taking skills or non-generalizable proficiency on a limited range of topics on which the tests focus. We would, however, expect higher quality teachers to produce not only literacy and mathematical ability, but civic responsibility, historical knowledge and insight, scientific background, cooperative work skills, good character, and appreciation of the arts and music. Perhaps teachers whose students have high math and reading scores are also teachers who produce these other outcomes, but we have no evidence one way or the other. We do know, however, that schools serving disadvantaged children under pressure to meet test-defined accountability targets have been reducing time spent on other critical subject matter.

There is, indeed, a consensus of scholarly opinion that student test scores, even of the value-added variety, are not sufficiently accurate to be used as the major indicator of teacher quality. They can’t adequately control for the differences in student characteristics between classrooms, they can’t control for differences in other school characteristics, and they rarely reflect a sufficiently large sample size for reliability. I recently had the privilege of joining a distinguished group of economists and psychometricians who reviewed this evidence, producing a report entitled, Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Test scores, in context, can be one part of a holistic evaluation, but not the major part.

Of course, schools should do a better job of removing teachers who don’t add value to what children bring to their classrooms. This should be a part, but only a part, of an overall strategy to raise the average level of student achievement. But when Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee launch a national campaign to make this the single most important focus of school improvement, they not only demoralize good teachers by exaggerating their responsibility for student outcomes, but ignore many other potential areas for intervention that might have bigger impacts. In addition to those mentioned above, these also include working, either directly or in collaboration with other community organizations, to provide higher-quality early childhood and out-of-school time experiences, as well as the health and nutrition that also influence student achievement.

My review of the Klein-Rhee manifesto notes that the biggest threat to student achievement in the current age is our unprecedented economic catastrophe and its effect on parents and their children’s ability to gain from higher-quality schools. Chancellors Klein and Rhee aim to close the black-white achievement gap, but this will not be possible when 15% of all black children have an unemployed parent, compared to 8.5% of white children. (If we also include children whose parents have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work, and children whose parents are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work, we find that 37% of black children have an unemployed or underemployed parent compared to 23% of white children.) Over half of all black children have a parent who has either been unemployed or underemployed during the past year. Thirty-six percent of black children now live in poverty.

When Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee equate concern with this catastrophe with a belief that children’s ZIP codes affect their achievement, they trivialize a national disaster. School chancellors and superintendents cannot do anything themselves to influence employment opportunities for the parents of our most challenged children. But when national policymakers and politicians exhibit a casual attitude towards unemployment, claiming that fiscal deficits prevent them from taking any action to address it, school chancellors and superintendents are irresponsible if they assure these politicians that, in effect, their lack of concern doesn’t matter because we can solve the problem by firing bad teachers. In this way, Michelle Rhee’s simplistic parting shot as D.C. Chancellor will contribute to the impoverishment not only of our children but of our national debate.

There are three key lessons would-be reformers should draw from Rhee's tenure. First, despite the enthusiastic claims of some proponents, mayoral control has real limits. The problem is that those swearing by the power of mayoral control have drawn heavily on the experiences of two exceptional mayors who, for very different reasons, have been nearly unbeatable: Richard Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York. For other mayors, the calculus may play out very differently. Rather than their muscle stabilizing the superintenent, the pain of serious reform may imperil their tenure. Fenty was upended by a challenger who attacked him as high-handed and inattentive to community sensibilities. Rhee's efforts were hardly the sole reason for this, but Fenty's staunch support for her hard-charging measures became a primary point of contention. With Fenty out, the bottom fell out for Rhee.

Second, it's a big mistake to imagine that things would have been different in D.C. if only Rhee or Fenty had been "nicer." Education reformers love to talk about the importance of consensus and stakeholder "buy-in". Now, if the goal is to improve a reasonably performing school or district, that's a viable strategy. But Rhee was hired to clean up a disaster zone. You can't do that without bruising feelings. When jobs are at stake and schools are being closed, there's little incentive for those at risk to do anything but push back. When it comes to troubled systems, even a thousand get-to-know-me sessions and stakeholder roundtables won't suffice. Rhee can testify to this, because she held scores of community conversations in 2007-08 when pursuing desperately needed school closings--only to be slammed for inadequate efforts to garner input or secure community buy-in.

Third, Rhee and Fenty operated on the premise that, if they could deliver impressive academic results in the first couple of years, their critics would melt away. Well, Rhee delivered impressive results, and the criticism multiplied. Tough measures create friction, explaining why less than 30% of the local African-American community was registering support for Fenty and Rhee. Transforming dysfunctional systems is disruptive. It provokes discomfort, even when progress is evident. Even parents inclined to support the measures may look askance at the conflict and wonder whether all the tumult is really necessary. To sustain their efforts for more than a season, would-be reformers need credible local allies who are consistently explaining why the harsh medicine is necessary and worth all the bother.

Rhee's experience proves it's not just about mayors, manners, achievement metrics. Turning troubled urban school systems around requires community cover and local political muscle. That's where cheering reformers failed to deliver for Fenty and Rhee and where would-be reformers need to do better going forward.

The lesson is that trying to negotiate with the union is folly. They may give a little, but in the end, they will find a way to win. As Mayor Fenty said when asked what he would have done differently, "I would have gone faster." Michelle Rhee and her team kept working at a compromise even though she could have implemented changes without their consent, as there was no contract in place at the time. Instead, she spent time -- well over a year -- negotiating a compromise. It's a great lesson to learn. You spend time trying to find common ground, only to have the opposition stab you in the back for trying.

Go fast, because they won't have time to fight. Lesson learned.